On Love and Loss
by fliznid
Summary: Tessa and Magnus get fabulously drunk and reminisce over loves lost and hearts broken


Magnus wanders into the kitchen, his hair a ridiculous mess of tangles, draped in his lightest clothes. The July heat is killing him. She's sitting by the kitchen table, a cup of something clutched in her hands, her long brown hair hanging in tangles down her back. She looks up as he enters and she tries to spare him a smile but fails. He wonders if she's been up all night.

"Good morning Tessa," he says kindly and she sighs deeply.

"By the Angel, is it morning already?' she asks and her voice is so tired. She's too young to hold such a tired voice.

"Couldn't sleep?" he tries.

"I tried but-"she doesn't finish her sentence. She takes a deep breath and tries again. "It's ten years."

Shit. Magnus had forgotten. Of course, it's the ten year anniversary of Will's death. Of course she couldn't sleep.

He slides in across from her and looks at her, noticing the bags under her eyes and the frailty her immortality brings her. "Is there something I can do?" he offers and he knows she'll say no. What can he possibly do?

"You can, actually," she says and he blinks. "I'm going to visit the grave for a bit. And when I get back Magnus I want you to do something for me."

"What?" he asks and for a second he's scared. Scared of the desperation and pain and emptiness he sees in her eyes.

"I want you to get me drunk Magnus," she says, her voice steady. "I want you to get me fabulously drunk and then I want you to give me tissues while I cry."

. . .

"- so then he turns to the waiter and says, in perfect Welsh, 'You sir are a cad!'" Tessa chokes out between laughs. "The man was so shocked he dropped our food!"

Magnus is laughing with her, separated from her slightly by the bottles of alcohol they've been slowly emptying. "You truly are drunk," he laughs back and realizes he's drunk too.

"I've never really been drunk before," she smiles. "I tried but… mundane alcohol just doesn't cut it for us, does it?"

"Be glad I have so much warlock alcohol," he grins rakishly and her stomach turns.

Suddenly she turns serious. "Magnus?" she asks.

"Yes?" he wonders, his face calm.

"Who was your first love?" she asks and the question cuts him deep with memories of soft blonde hair, a color he should never have found in Indonesia.

"I knew her since we were kids," he says, feeling the memories pouring out of him. "I used to see her when I went to get water from the well at the edge of town. And then one day I just-"he remembers it now, taking her ridiculously, impractically soft hands in his and dragging her deep into the woods where he could lean her up against a tree and kiss that perfect mouth of hers over and over and over again.

"What happened?" Tessa asks, breaking his memories, shattering his train of thought like glass.

"I ran away,' he says simply, shrugging. "After I killed the man who was not my father, it seemed like the most logical course of action. They were mounting a witch hunt against me. And-"he shudders on a breath he didn't realize he was holding. "I have no doubt she joined in."

Tessa lets out a deep breath. "But you have loved others since then," she says and it's a statement, not a question.

"One cannot grieve forever," he says, an explanation.

"Sometimes I think I will," she says, lost in her own. "And sometimes I'm just so lonely Magnus. I'm so lonely it's like an ache eating me up from the inside and my heart, _my heart_, it feels so dead."

"Tessa?" he starts softly. "I'm going to be very crass."

She turns and looks at him.

"Why haven't you taken another lover since Will's death?"

"I have not loved anyone else since Will," she whispers, as though holding her heart together.

He has to say it, has to ask it, "Not a partner Tessa. Just a one-time thing, a matter of intimacy of bodies, nothing more."

She laughs softly but it's a hurt laugh. "This he asks me on the anniversary of my husband's death," she mutters and she drinks deeply from the bottle in her hand.

"I warned you it was crass," he says, unashamed.

"That you did," she nods ad a thought crosses his mind.

"Tessa," he starts, grabbing her hand, "what if I told you I was utterly in love with you?"

She doesn't hesitate. "I wouldn't believe you for a minute."

He laughs softly. "Worth a shot," he mutters.

"Magnus!" Tessa exclaims, trying to sound horrified. "Could it be you have been feigning friendship with me all these years merely to sleep with me?"

He laughs, a real one. "Hardly. Although one can't blame a man for being curious just what it was that made not one but _two _gloriously handsome boys fall in love with you."

"Well you can be certain it wasn't my skills in bed," she laughs. "Only one man has seen those and that was after many confessions of love."

Magnus's eyes widen. "So that time when I caught you two-"

"Was our first time, yes," she says.

He roars. "And I walked in in the middle of it!"

"You walked in on the morning after, let's not embellish," she chides.

"But I must," he laughs. "Although I'd be happy with a re-enactment-"

"Oh don't you start," she laughs and they're rolling together, in a whirl of drunkenness and pain and suddenly she says,

"Did you ever go back?"

"Back?" Magnus asks, his hand hovering somewhere near hers.

"To Indonesia," she clarifies. "To find out what happened to that girl."

He's coming down now from whatever euphoric state the alcohol sent him to and he's staring into her endless gray eyes. Of course he never went back. Why would he go back, to the place where his mother hung herself, to the place where he killed the man who was not his father, to the place where he had lived his life as half a person, full of pain and shame and sorrow?

But all he says is, "No. I never did."

"Let's," she says simply. "Let's go back, you and I."

He stares at her. He wants to tell her she's crazy and there's no way in hell he's going back but instead he says, "On one condition."

"Magnus I'm not sleeping with you."

"No," he laughs. "Not that. I'll go if you tell me about Will."

"But I've told you-"

"No funny stories," he says. "I want sad ones, real tearjerkers. Give me the worse you've got."

And so she tells him. She tells him about how the first time they made love after their wedding she had cried ad cried and he had held her as she remembered that this would've, should've, been her wedding night with someone else.

About how every year when she came back from her meeting with Jem he would be waiting for her by the window. And he wouldn't say a word, just hand her tissues as she sobbed. And when she was calm he would pick her up and carry her to their bedroom and ravage her as if trying desperately to claim her again, make a mark on her skin in kisses that she was his now.

How sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and he wouldn't be next to her but instead in the doorway of the nursery, watching their children sleep as though he couldn't believe they existed, couldn't believe they were his.

How every time she picked flowers she saved one, just one, for him that she would tuck gently into her breast pocket so everyone would know that this was a man whose wife loved him enough to get him flowers.

How- but she can't continue because she's sobbing too hard and Magnus has crossed over to hold her and she's sobbing into his chest as though her heart will break. But he knows that it can't because it's already too badly broken.

And when she's cried herself to sleep he picks her up and carries her to the mattress by the window and tucks her in. And if he spends the whole night awake in his room, crying utterly silent tears, then he certainly doesn't tell her in the morning.

. . .

They go to Indonesia that August. They wander the markets and the bazars and the museums and after two weeks of wheedling and pleading he takes her to the tiny village where he was born.

They walk down through the center of the haphazardly constructed town as the people stare at them, the refined young woman in a tailored dress and the young man with the right skin color and the wrong shaped eyes. And when they get to a little house by the edge of the town Magnus freezes and stares.

The door is wide open and they can see a mother and her two children running circles around her and somewhere in the background a male voice is calling rapidly in a language Tessa doesn't recognize.

"Indonesian," Magnus says softly, reading her mind. "He's asking if dinner is ready."

"Is this where you grew up?" she asks and he nods, his eyes going to a pile of wood behind the house that may once have been a barn where his mother had-

"Why don't you ask if you can look around?" Tessa suggests. "I'm sure they won't mind if you tell them-"

"Tell them what Tessa? That I lived here as a boy?" he asks. "That family has lived here for generations, they're not going to understand how I could have lived here as a child. No. It's enough for me to look at it."

And so they look at it for what seems like hours until Magnus wrenches his eyes away and walks, decidedly, towards the church in the center of town. Tessa was surprised to see it until she remembered just how hungrily Europeans had colonized the Dutch East Indies, filling them with their language and culture and religion and seed.

Behind the church sits a ramshackled cemetery and Magnus weaves through the tombstones until he finds the one he's looking for, a small stone worn by time and nature.

"They weren't going to let he be buried here, being a suicide and all, but he paid someone a bit of money and-"Magnus is suddenly at loss for words.

Tessa stands beside him, staring down at the stone. On it are words in a language she can't read and Magnus translates.

"_Loving mother, devoted wife,"_ he reads and he wants to laugh. Oh what a loving mother she had been. From the time he was old enough to remember she couldn't bear to look him in the face, see his cat eyes and unblemished stomach without wanting to hurl. Oh she had been loving, if your definition of loving included sticks and words that can't be taken back, words no mother should ever say to their child.

"Is she buried here too?" Tessa asks, breaking him out of his self-deprecating hole. "Your first love?"

"She might be," he shrugs but he suddenly doesn't care. All he wants is to be out of this place, free of the haunting memories it comes with, free of the shame it sews back deep into his heart.

"Let's go," he says and he drags Tessa from this village of memories.

On the ship back to Paris she comes into his room in the dead of night and takes her turn holding him as he cries. Their hands link silently and for a minute there is utter peace in their hearts.


End file.
